Nanoswimmer goes for gold
The recent paper "Artificial Swimmers Propelled by Acoustically Activated Flagella" by Daniel Ahmed, Thierry Baasch, Bumjin Jang, Salvador Pané, Jürg Dual, and Bradley J. Nelson, Nanoletters, was featured on many international news channels.
Extract from Nanotechweb.org:
Researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have made a new type of nanoswimmer with a flexible tail that is propelled by acoustic waves. The nanobot might be used in a host of application areas, including drug delivery, non-invasive surgery, material assembly, lithography and even water treatment.
Artificial swimmers can convert energy from their environment into motion. For example, bimetallic motors can harvest chemical energy and move by self-electrophoresis and by decomposing fuel asymmetrically across their surfaces. They can also move thanks to chemical and optical gradients, local analyte concentrations or by exploiting magnetic, electrical, light, thermal and acoustic fields.
Acoustically propelled motors are particularly interesting in biomedical contexts since swimmers that work using electric fields cannot be used in biological environments, such as the human body.
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